“Threats” by Jean Grae
By Natalie Silver
Jean Grae was disrespected.
The Cape Town-born, New York City-bred, underground MC sensation is named and depicted in the controversial album, Jean Grae: The Evil Jeanius (2008) that was produced by San Francisco production duo Blue Sky Black Death and released by Babygrande without her consent. The use of her verses was unauthorized, making her lyrics—particularly those in “Threats,” which attack the music industry and its patriarchal backbone—even more seething and relevant when paired with the context of their distribution.
Grae’s verses in Threats bathe in the gospel morality of a spliced, strobed, overdubbed and embattled remix of the deepest and roughest moments of Etta James’ “Something’s Got A Hold On Me.” The result is a composed and impassioned conversation between empowered women in soul and poetry and hip hop that is so intense, it is impossible to distinguish whether pleasure or pain is being conveyed.
Then the 1:14 mark hits, the claps and stomping morph into a cleaner and more ruthless drum track and the song kicks into the next gear, taking Grae’s liberal cover of Jay-Z’s “Threat” into the stratosphere and elevating its impact in raging feminist discourse.
You thought Nas hated Jay-Z (have you heard “Ether”?), but Grae addresses the Black Album mastermind with spitting candor, turning his own words onto himself and lacing them with a fire and self-aggrandizement that is both abrasive and eloquent, a fierce form of poetry only capable of by an angry and betrayed woman.
“The technique, peep the new set
And I don't mean two teats
Never try to run up you dumb fuck
This is an unusual musical, reconstructed
You're lookin' at the new Harriet Tubman
So all critics can suck this”
Grae uses Jay as a symbol of the hyper-masculine, testosterone-driven gangster rap world, really directing her threats at the ambiguous, jocky figure that possesses dominance and disproportionate levels of artistic capital in the music industry.
She utilizes Jay’s blueprint of “Threat” itself, hitting his key rhymes on the dot and paralleling his verse structure, redefining his lyrics and pointing them at him—and other kings of the rap world—to assert her presence as a black woman in the male-dominated industry while appropriating the testosterone-heavy lyrics of violence, territorialism and, well, threats, and re-writing them with a female savviness. She somehow echoes the rage behind Jay’s song while elevating the intelligence of its form, primarily by drawing attention to a menacing and unquestioned prevalence of sexualization and objectification of women within the gangster rap world.
“Threats” is Grae’s proof that she belongs in the industry as an artist, as a woman, and as a legitimate and searing threat, transcending a predestined and archetypal role of a sexual object in a song cover that is more daunting than its original form. She proves the words she raps using the template of an iconic and arguably untouchable male rap artist, actualizing her prophecy in the vehicle of the song itself.
It is scarily meta. And if I were Babygrande, I’d be running for my life.
Natalie Silver is a native Californian who graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Media Studies. She believes that the critical millennial voice is the most prolific threat to contemporary systems of oppression, and she would rather die than work in tech. Alas, she fell into independent journalism.
